From jhforest at gmail.com Sat Nov 16 06:21:43 2013 From: jhforest at gmail.com (Jim Forest) Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 12:21:43 +0100 Subject: [percy-l] =?windows-1252?q?Flannery_O=92Connor=92s_=91Prayer_Jour?= =?windows-1252?q?nal=92?= Message-ID: On the theory that Walker Percy readers are also, in may cases, Flannery O"Connor readers, I share the following. Jim Forest http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/books/review/flannery-oconnors-prayer-journal.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20131115 The BelieverFlannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? By MARILYNNE ROBINSON NY Times / Published: November 15, 2013 This slender, charming book must be approached with a special tact. To read it feels a little like an intrusion on inwardness itself. The volume contains, alongside a lightly corrected transcription, a facsimile of the Sterling notebook in which Flannery O?Connor, just 20 years old, began a journal addressed to God. Written in her neat hand, it is reproduced complete with the empty final pages (her concluding words are ?there is nothing left to say of me?) and not omitting a bit of musical notation floating on the inside of the back cover. The prayers, attempts at prayer and meditations on faith and art contained in it were written in 1946 and 1947, while O?Connor was a student in Iowa. The brilliance that would make her fictions literary classics is fully apparent in them. Enlarge This Image Martha Sprieser (Georgia College Library, Milledgeville) A PRAYER JOURNAL By Flannery O?Connor 96 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $18. The complexity of O?Connor?s thinking, together with the largely flawless pages in her hand, suggest that these entries may be fair copies of earlier drafts. Clearly O?Connor?s virtuosity makes her self-?conscious. Young as she was, new to writing, she could only have been pleased, even awed, at having produced these beautiful sentences. Perhaps nothing written is finally meant to go unread, even if the reader is only a creature of the writer?s mind, an attentive and exacting self that compels refinements of honesty. After a little joke about the pedestrian uses we would make of a knowledge of heaven if we had been given one, she says, remembering her intended Hearer, ?But I do not mean to be clever although I do mean to be clever on 2nd thought and like to be clever & want to be considered so.? Her mind is examined, faith questioned, weakness confessed, powers tried as they might not have been under the eye of any human observer. Youth and loneliness and the unspent energies of a singular mind are testing the possible and must be allowed free play. It is the religious sensibility reflected in this journal that makes it as eloquent on the subject of creativity as it is on the subject of prayer. O?Connor?s awareness of her gifts gives her a special kind of interest in them. Having concluded one early entry by asking the Lord to help her ?with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing,? she begins the next entry: ?Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don?t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story ? just like the typewriter was mine.? Every writer wonders where fictional ideas come from. The best of them often appear very abruptly after a period of imaginative drought. And, mysteriously, they really are good ideas, much superior to the contrivances of conscious invention. Such experiences are by no means exclusive to writers with religious worldviews. But believing them to be literal gifts grants them an objective existence they seem actually to deserve. This entails problems, of course. Fiction rarely shows a divine imprimatur, as its mortal creators are well aware. I would be curious to know what story or part of a story by O?Connor should be attributed to the Lord. It can seem self-aggrandizing or simply bizarre to ascribe any thought or work to a seemingly external source, named or unnamed. Nevertheless, ?Hesiod, Pindar and any number of poets and prophets before and after them have declared indebtedness of this kind. If they, and O?Connor, were na?ve, sophistication has made language poorer. There is no way now to describe an experience many a writer can attest to, having been surprised by it, and having enjoyed it as a particular pleasure and reward of the art. Religion is by its nature more accommodating to the unaccountable than rationalism ever can be. While O?Connor was a student at the Iowa Writers? Workshop she was also a daily communicant at St. Mary?s Catholic Church at the edge of campus. Her journal reflects a conflict, in her mind at least, between a skeptical intellectual environment and the faith she sometimes anxiously sustains. She says: ?I dread, Oh Lord, losing my faith. My mind is not strong. It is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery. I do not want it to be fear which keeps me in the church.? She knows all the arguments against religion. They seem to have changed little over the last 70 years, so there is no need to rehearse them here. Considering the threat she feels them to be, it is striking that atheism, in an apparently Southern, vernacular incarnation with nothing intellectual about it, is at the center of ?Wise Blood,? the novel she had already begun to write and submit to be read in workshop. This is a tale in which pathos tips into pathology and violence, answered by a penance of self-mutilation and suffering. Yet the prose is absolutely brilliant, sentence by sentence, simile by simile, and so relentlessly inventive it feels comic. The young writer prays, ?Please let Christian principles permeate my writing and please let there be enough of my writing (published) for Christian principles to permeate.? At prayer she is scrupulous in her candor, and a little wry therefore. She seems already to be making important decisions about the means by which she will carry forward her intention to write as a Christian, influenced by her reaction to the assertive skepticism and the fashionable theism she senses around her. She says, ?Give me the grace, dear God, to see the bareness and the misery of the places where You are not adored but desecrated.? This might serve as a gloss on the fiction she was writing at the time, which conjures such a world. She asks: ?Am I trying to shock with God? Am I trying to push Him in there violently, feet foremost? Maybe that?s all right. Maybe if I?m doing it it?s all right?? Certainly by the standards of the most tentative or perfunctory reverence her language can seem transgressive. Her religious sincerity is beyond question, but the forms of its expression raise many questions. This is no criticism. It is the honorable work of any writer who touches on great matters to provoke. And it is a discipline of writing well to allow the fiction to discover itself, however it may startle its writer?s intentions as it does so. She says of the story for which she has thanked God: ?I am not trying to disparage anybody?s religion although when it was coming out, I didn?t know exactly what I was trying to do or what it was going to mean. . . . Please don?t let me have to scrap the story because it turns out to mean more wrong than right ? or any wrong.? The particular pleasure of life in Iowa City rests not so much in the fact that the girl beside you on the bus or behind you in line might well be pondering a great and turbulent tradition of thought and belief, and finding new language to explore it. This could be true anywhere. It is that here the privilege of hearing or seeing her thoughts as fiction or poetry, even seeing them emerge and develop, is widely shared. This little journal puts its reader a step closer to one touching and remarkable young mind. * * * *Marilynne Robinson is the author of three novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning ?Gilead,? and four books of nonfiction. Her essay collection ?When I Was a Child I Read Books? was published last year.* -- *Jim & Nancy Forest* Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands Jim's books: www.jimandnancyforest.com/books/ Jim & Nancy web site: www.jimandnancyforest.com Photo collections: www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/ On Pilgrimage blog: http://jimandnancyonpilgrimage.blogspot.com/ A Tale of Two Kidneys blog: http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/ In Communion site: www.incommunion.org * * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jeriley at uark.edu Sun Nov 17 15:36:37 2013 From: jeriley at uark.edu (John E. Riley) Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2013 20:36:37 +0000 Subject: [percy-l] Flannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? (Jim Forest) Message-ID: Thank you for sharing this. The author of this review, Marilynne Robinson, is herself an accomplished author. I was struck by the following statement from her review: it is striking that atheism, in an apparently Southern, vernacular incarnation with nothing intellectual about it, is at the center of ?Wise Blood... To bring things full circle, I can see that statement, or at least parts of it, applying to Lancelot as well. John Riley Reference Mullins Library University of Arkansas Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA ________________________________________ From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] on behalf of percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org [percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org] Sent: Saturday, November 16, 2013 11:00 AM To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: Percy-L Digest, Vol 104, Issue 1 Send Percy-L mailing list submissions to percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org You can reach the person managing the list at percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Percy-L digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Flannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? (Jim Forest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 12:21:43 +0100 From: Jim Forest Subject: [percy-l] Flannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" On the theory that Walker Percy readers are also, in may cases, Flannery O"Connor readers, I share the following. Jim Forest http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/books/review/flannery-oconnors-prayer-journal.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20131115 The BelieverFlannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? By MARILYNNE ROBINSON NY Times / Published: November 15, 2013 This slender, charming book must be approached with a special tact. To read it feels a little like an intrusion on inwardness itself. The volume contains, alongside a lightly corrected transcription, a facsimile of the Sterling notebook in which Flannery O?Connor, just 20 years old, began a journal addressed to God. Written in her neat hand, it is reproduced complete with the empty final pages (her concluding words are ?there is nothing left to say of me?) and not omitting a bit of musical notation floating on the inside of the back cover. The prayers, attempts at prayer and meditations on faith and art contained in it were written in 1946 and 1947, while O?Connor was a student in Iowa. The brilliance that would make her fictions literary classics is fully apparent in them. Enlarge This Image Martha Sprieser (Georgia College Library, Milledgeville) A PRAYER JOURNAL By Flannery O?Connor 96 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $18. The complexity of O?Connor?s thinking, together with the largely flawless pages in her hand, suggest that these entries may be fair copies of earlier drafts. Clearly O?Connor?s virtuosity makes her self-?conscious. Young as she was, new to writing, she could only have been pleased, even awed, at having produced these beautiful sentences. Perhaps nothing written is finally meant to go unread, even if the reader is only a creature of the writer?s mind, an attentive and exacting self that compels refinements of honesty. After a little joke about the pedestrian uses we would make of a knowledge of heaven if we had been given one, she says, remembering her intended Hearer, ?But I do not mean to be clever although I do mean to be clever on 2nd thought and like to be clever & want to be considered so.? Her mind is examined, faith questioned, weakness confessed, powers tried as they might not have been under the eye of any human observer. Youth and loneliness and the unspent energies of a singular mind are testing the possible and must be allowed free play. It is the religious sensibility reflected in this journal that makes it as eloquent on the subject of creativity as it is on the subject of prayer. O?Connor?s awareness of her gifts gives her a special kind of interest in them. Having concluded one early entry by asking the Lord to help her ?with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing,? she begins the next entry: ?Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don?t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story ? just like the typewriter was mine.? Every writer wonders where fictional ideas come from. The best of them often appear very abruptly after a period of imaginative drought. And, mysteriously, they really are good ideas, much superior to the contrivances of conscious invention. Such experiences are by no means exclusive to writers with religious worldviews. But believing them to be literal gifts grants them an objective existence they seem actually to deserve. This entails problems, of course. Fiction rarely shows a divine imprimatur, as its mortal creators are well aware. I would be curious to know what story or part of a story by O?Connor should be attributed to the Lord. It can seem self-aggrandizing or simply bizarre to ascribe any thought or work to a seemingly external source, named or unnamed. Nevertheless, ?Hesiod, Pindar and any number of poets and prophets before and after them have declared indebtedness of this kind. If they, and O?Connor, were na?ve, sophistication has made language poorer. There is no way now to describe an experience many a writer can attest to, having been surprised by it, and having enjoyed it as a particular pleasure and reward of the art. Religion is by its nature more accommodating to the unaccountable than rationalism ever can be. While O?Connor was a student at the Iowa Writers? Workshop she was also a daily communicant at St. Mary?s Catholic Church at the edge of campus. Her journal reflects a conflict, in her mind at least, between a skeptical intellectual environment and the faith she sometimes anxiously sustains. She says: ?I dread, Oh Lord, losing my faith. My mind is not strong. It is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery. I do not want it to be fear which keeps me in the church.? She knows all the arguments against religion. They seem to have changed little over the last 70 years, so there is no need to rehearse them here. Considering the threat she feels them to be, it is striking that atheism, in an apparently Southern, vernacular incarnation with nothing intellectual about it, is at the center of ?Wise Blood,? the novel she had already begun to write and submit to be read in workshop. This is a tale in which pathos tips into pathology and violence, answered by a penance of self-mutilation and suffering. Yet the prose is absolutely brilliant, sentence by sentence, simile by simile, and so relentlessly inventive it feels comic. The young writer prays, ?Please let Christian principles permeate my writing and please let there be enough of my writing (published) for Christian principles to permeate.? At prayer she is scrupulous in her candor, and a little wry therefore. She seems already to be making important decisions about the means by which she will carry forward her intention to write as a Christian, influenced by her reaction to the assertive skepticism and the fashionable theism she senses around her. She says, ?Give me the grace, dear God, to see the bareness and the misery of the places where You are not adored but desecrated.? This might serve as a gloss on the fiction she was writing at the time, which conjures such a world. She asks: ?Am I trying to shock with God? Am I trying to push Him in there violently, feet foremost? Maybe that?s all right. Maybe if I?m doing it it?s all right?? Certainly by the standards of the most tentative or perfunctory reverence her language can seem transgressive. Her religious sincerity is beyond question, but the forms of its expression raise many questions. This is no criticism. It is the honorable work of any writer who touches on great matters to provoke. And it is a discipline of writing well to allow the fiction to discover itself, however it may startle its writer?s intentions as it does so. She says of the story for which she has thanked God: ?I am not trying to disparage anybody?s religion although when it was coming out, I didn?t know exactly what I was trying to do or what it was going to mean. . . . Please don?t let me have to scrap the story because it turns out to mean more wrong than right ? or any wrong.? The particular pleasure of life in Iowa City rests not so much in the fact that the girl beside you on the bus or behind you in line might well be pondering a great and turbulent tradition of thought and belief, and finding new language to explore it. This could be true anywhere. It is that here the privilege of hearing or seeing her thoughts as fiction or poetry, even seeing them emerge and develop, is widely shared. This little journal puts its reader a step closer to one touching and remarkable young mind. * * * *Marilynne Robinson is the author of three novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning ?Gilead,? and four books of nonfiction. Her essay collection ?When I Was a Child I Read Books? was published last year.* -- *Jim & Nancy Forest* Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands Jim's books: www.jimandnancyforest.com/books/ Jim & Nancy web site: www.jimandnancyforest.com Photo collections: www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/ On Pilgrimage blog: http://jimandnancyonpilgrimage.blogspot.com/ A Tale of Two Kidneys blog: http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/ In Communion site: www.incommunion.org * * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/attachments/20131116/8d27211b/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Percy-L mailing list Percy-L at lists.ibiblio.org http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l End of Percy-L Digest, Vol 104, Issue 1 *************************************** From janetcantor37 at yahoo.com Mon Nov 18 12:09:01 2013 From: janetcantor37 at yahoo.com (janetcantor37 at yahoo.com) Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2013 09:09:01 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] Flannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? (Jim Forest) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1384794541.95075.YahooMailNeo@web141104.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> A propos of nothing, I always loved the way Percy ended his novels. The endings lead the reader to his thesis. It took me a while to figure out what the ending of Lancelot meant, but when it hit me, it hit me hard. In the final sentence and one word response, all of Percy's work is explained. Janet Cantor ________________________________ From: John E. Riley To: "percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org" Sent: Sunday, November 17, 2013 3:36 PM Subject: [percy-l] Flannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? (Jim Forest) Thank you for sharing this. The author of this review, Marilynne Robinson, is herself an accomplished author. I was struck by the following statement from her review: it is striking that atheism, in an apparently Southern, vernacular incarnation with nothing intellectual about it, is at the center of ?Wise Blood... To bring things full circle, I can see that statement, or at least parts of it, applying to Lancelot as well. John Riley Reference Mullins Library University of Arkansas Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA ________________________________________ From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] on behalf of percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org [percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org] Sent: Saturday, November 16, 2013 11:00 AM To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: Percy-L Digest, Vol 104, Issue 1 Send Percy-L mailing list submissions to ? ? ? ? percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit ? ? ? ? http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to ? ? ? ? percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org You can reach the person managing the list at ? ? ? ? percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Percy-L digest..." Today's Topics: ? 1. Flannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? (Jim Forest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 12:21:43 +0100 From: Jim Forest Subject: [percy-l] Flannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" ? ? ? ? Message-ID: ? ? ? ? Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" On the theory that Walker Percy readers are also, in may cases, Flannery O"Connor readers, I share the following. Jim Forest http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/books/review/flannery-oconnors-prayer-journal.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20131115 The BelieverFlannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? By MARILYNNE ROBINSON NY Times / Published: November 15, 2013 This slender, charming book must be approached with a special tact. To read it feels a little like an intrusion on inwardness itself. The volume contains, alongside a lightly corrected transcription, a facsimile of the Sterling notebook in which Flannery O?Connor, just 20 years old, began a journal addressed to God. Written in her neat hand, it is reproduced complete with the empty final pages (her concluding words are ?there is nothing left to say of me?) and not omitting a bit of musical notation floating on the inside of the back cover. The prayers, attempts at prayer and meditations on faith and art contained in it were written in 1946 and 1947, while O?Connor was a student in Iowa. The brilliance that would make her fictions literary classics is fully apparent in them. ? Enlarge This Image ? Martha Sprieser (Georgia College Library, Milledgeville) A PRAYER JOURNAL By Flannery O?Connor 96 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $18. The complexity of O?Connor?s thinking, together with the largely flawless pages in her hand, suggest that these entries may be fair copies of earlier drafts. Clearly O?Connor?s virtuosity makes her self-?conscious. Young as she was, new to writing, she could only have been pleased, even awed, at having produced these beautiful sentences. Perhaps nothing written is finally meant to go unread, even if the reader is only a creature of the writer?s mind, an attentive and exacting self that compels refinements of honesty. After a little joke about the pedestrian uses we would make of a knowledge of heaven if we had been given one, she says, remembering her intended Hearer, ?But I do not mean to be clever although I do mean to be clever on 2nd thought and like to be clever & want to be considered so.? Her mind is examined, faith questioned, weakness confessed, powers tried as they might not have been under the eye of any human observer. Youth and loneliness and the unspent energies of a singular mind are testing the possible and must be allowed free play. It is the religious sensibility reflected in this journal that makes it as eloquent on the subject of creativity as it is on the subject of prayer. O?Connor?s awareness of her gifts gives her a special kind of interest in them. Having concluded one early entry by asking the Lord to help her ?with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing,? she begins the next entry: ?Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don?t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story ? just like the typewriter was mine.? Every writer wonders where fictional ideas come from. The best of them often appear very abruptly after a period of imaginative drought. And, mysteriously, they really are good ideas, much superior to the contrivances of conscious invention. Such experiences are by no means exclusive to writers with religious worldviews. But believing them to be literal gifts grants them an objective existence they seem actually to deserve. This entails problems, of course. Fiction rarely shows a divine imprimatur, as its mortal creators are well aware. I would be curious to know what story or part of a story by O?Connor should be attributed to the Lord. It can seem self-aggrandizing or simply bizarre to ascribe any thought or work to a seemingly external source, named or unnamed. Nevertheless, ?Hesiod, Pindar and any number of poets and prophets before and after them have declared indebtedness of this kind. If they, and O?Connor, were na?ve, sophistication has made language poorer. There is no way now to describe an experience many a writer can attest to, having been surprised by it, and having enjoyed it as a particular pleasure and reward of the art. Religion is by its nature more accommodating to the unaccountable than rationalism ever can be. While O?Connor was a student at the Iowa Writers? Workshop she was also a daily communicant at St. Mary?s Catholic Church at the edge of campus. Her journal reflects a conflict, in her mind at least, between a skeptical intellectual environment and the faith she sometimes anxiously sustains. She says: ?I dread, Oh Lord, losing my faith. My mind is not strong. It is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery. I do not want it to be fear which keeps me in the church.? She knows all the arguments against religion. They seem to have changed little over the last 70 years, so there is no need to rehearse them here. Considering the threat she feels them to be, it is striking that atheism, in an apparently Southern, vernacular incarnation with nothing intellectual about it, is at the center of ?Wise Blood,? the novel she had already begun to write and submit to be read in workshop. This is a tale in which pathos tips into pathology and violence, answered by a penance of self-mutilation and suffering. Yet the prose is absolutely brilliant, sentence by sentence, simile by simile, and so relentlessly inventive it feels comic. The young writer prays, ?Please let Christian principles permeate my writing and please let there be enough of my writing (published) for Christian principles to permeate.? At prayer she is scrupulous in her candor, and a little wry therefore. She seems already to be making important decisions about the means by which she will carry forward her intention to write as a Christian, influenced by her reaction to the assertive skepticism and the fashionable theism she senses around her. She says, ?Give me the grace, dear God, to see the bareness and the misery of the places where You are not adored but desecrated.? This might serve as a gloss on the fiction she was writing at the time, which conjures such a world. She asks: ?Am I trying to shock with God? Am I trying to push Him in there violently, feet foremost? Maybe that?s all right. Maybe if I?m doing it it?s all right?? Certainly by the standards of the most tentative or perfunctory reverence her language can seem transgressive. Her religious sincerity is beyond question, but the forms of its expression raise many questions. This is no criticism. It is the honorable work of any writer who touches on great matters to provoke. And it is a discipline of writing well to allow the fiction to discover itself, however it may startle its writer?s intentions as it does so. She says of the story for which she has thanked God: ?I am not trying to disparage anybody?s religion although when it was coming out, I didn?t know exactly what I was trying to do or what it was going to mean. . . . Please don?t let me have to scrap the story because it turns out to mean more wrong than right ? or any wrong.? The particular pleasure of life in Iowa City rests not so much in the fact that the girl beside you on the bus or behind you in line might well be pondering a great and turbulent tradition of thought and belief, and finding new language to explore it. This could be true anywhere. It is that here the privilege of hearing or seeing her thoughts as fiction or poetry, even seeing them emerge and develop, is widely shared. This little journal puts its reader a step closer to one touching and remarkable young mind. * * * *Marilynne Robinson is the author of three novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning ?Gilead,? and four books of nonfiction. Her essay collection ?When I Was a Child I Read Books? was published last year.* -- *Jim & Nancy Forest* Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands Jim's books: www.jimandnancyforest.com/books/ Jim & Nancy web site: www.jimandnancyforest.com Photo collections: www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/ On Pilgrimage blog: http://jimandnancyonpilgrimage.blogspot.com/ A Tale of Two Kidneys blog: http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/ In Communion site: www.incommunion.org * * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/attachments/20131116/8d27211b/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Percy-L mailing list Percy-L at lists.ibiblio.org http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l End of Percy-L Digest, Vol 104, Issue 1 *************************************** -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ Visit The Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy Contact the moderator: percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org (note: add @ sign when addressing email) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From joshuaemrich at yahoo.com Mon Nov 18 12:24:00 2013 From: joshuaemrich at yahoo.com (joshua emrich) Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2013 09:24:00 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] Flannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? (Jim Forest) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1384795440.3978.YahooMailNeo@web140303.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Flannery O'Conner made fun of book clubs like this one. On Monday, November 18, 2013 6:45 AM, John E. Riley wrote: Thank you for sharing this. The author of this review, Marilynne Robinson, is herself an accomplished author. I was struck by the following statement from her review: > >it is striking that atheism, in an apparently Southern, vernacular incarnation with nothing intellectual about it, is at the center of ?Wise Blood... > >To bring things full circle, I can see that statement, or at least parts of it, applying to Lancelot as well. > >John Riley >Reference >Mullins Library >University of Arkansas >Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA > > >________________________________________ >From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] on behalf of percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org [percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org] >Sent: Saturday, November 16, 2013 11:00 AM >To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org >Subject: Percy-L Digest, Vol 104, Issue 1 > >Send Percy-L mailing list submissions to >? ? ? ? percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org > >To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit >? ? ? ? http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l >or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to >? ? ? ? percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org > >You can reach the person managing the list at >? ? ? ? percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org > >When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific >than "Re: Contents of Percy-L digest..." > > >Today's Topics: > >? 1. Flannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? (Jim Forest) > > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- > >Message: 1 >Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 12:21:43 +0100 >From: Jim Forest >Subject: [percy-l] Flannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? >To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" >? ? ? ? >Message-ID: >? ? ? ? >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" > >On the theory that Walker Percy readers are also, in may cases, Flannery >O"Connor readers, I share the following. > >Jim Forest > >http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/books/review/flannery-oconnors-prayer-journal.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20131115 > >The BelieverFlannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? By MARILYNNE ROBINSON NY >Times / Published: November 15, 2013 > >This slender, charming book must be approached with a special tact. To read >it feels a little like an intrusion on inwardness itself. The volume >contains, alongside a lightly corrected transcription, a facsimile of the >Sterling notebook in which Flannery O?Connor, just 20 years old, began a >journal addressed to God. Written in her neat hand, it is reproduced >complete with the empty final pages (her concluding words are ?there is >nothing left to say of me?) and not omitting a bit of musical notation >floating on the inside of the back cover. The prayers, attempts at prayer >and meditations on faith and art contained in it were written in 1946 and >1947, while O?Connor was a student in Iowa. The brilliance that would make >her fictions literary classics is fully apparent in them. >? Enlarge This Image >? Martha Sprieser (Georgia College Library, Milledgeville) > >A PRAYER JOURNAL > >By Flannery O?Connor > >96 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $18. > >The complexity of O?Connor?s thinking, together with the largely flawless >pages in her hand, suggest that these entries may be fair copies of earlier >drafts. Clearly O?Connor?s virtuosity makes her self-?conscious. Young as >she was, new to writing, she could only have been pleased, even awed, at >having produced these beautiful sentences. Perhaps nothing written is >finally meant to go unread, even if the reader is only a creature of the >writer?s mind, an attentive and exacting self that compels refinements of >honesty. After a little joke about the pedestrian uses we would make of a >knowledge of heaven if we had been given one, she says, remembering her >intended Hearer, ?But I do not mean to be clever although I do mean to be >clever on 2nd thought and like to be clever & want to be considered so.? >Her mind is examined, faith questioned, weakness confessed, powers tried as >they might not have been under the eye of any human observer. Youth and >loneliness and the unspent energies of a singular mind are testing the >possible and must be allowed free play. > >It is the religious sensibility reflected in this journal that makes it as >eloquent on the subject of creativity as it is on the subject of prayer. >O?Connor?s awareness of her gifts gives her a special kind of interest in >them. Having concluded one early entry by asking the Lord to help her ?with >this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing,? she begins the next >entry: ?Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me >a story. Don?t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the >instrument for Your story ? just like the typewriter was mine.? > >Every writer wonders where fictional ideas come from. The best of them >often appear very abruptly after a period of imaginative drought. And, >mysteriously, they really are good ideas, much superior to the contrivances >of conscious invention. Such experiences are by no means exclusive to >writers with religious worldviews. But believing them to be literal gifts >grants them an objective existence they seem actually to deserve. This >entails problems, of course. Fiction rarely shows a divine imprimatur, as >its mortal creators are well aware. I would be curious to know what story >or part of a story by O?Connor should be attributed to the Lord. It can >seem self-aggrandizing or simply bizarre to ascribe any thought or work to >a seemingly external source, named or unnamed. Nevertheless, ?Hesiod, >Pindar and any number of poets and prophets before and after them have >declared indebtedness of this kind. If they, and O?Connor, were na?ve, >sophistication has made language poorer. There is no way now to describe an >experience many a writer can attest to, having been surprised by it, and >having enjoyed it as a particular pleasure and reward of the art. Religion >is by its nature more accommodating to the unaccountable than rationalism >ever can be. > >While O?Connor was a student at the Iowa Writers? Workshop she was also a >daily communicant at St. Mary?s Catholic Church at the edge of campus. Her >journal reflects a conflict, in her mind at least, between a skeptical >intellectual environment and the faith she sometimes anxiously sustains. >She says: ?I dread, Oh Lord, losing my faith. My mind is not strong. It is >a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery. I do not want it to be fear >which keeps me in the church.? She knows all the arguments against >religion. They seem to have changed little over the last 70 years, so there >is no need to rehearse them here. Considering the threat she feels them to >be, it is striking that atheism, in an apparently Southern, vernacular >incarnation with nothing intellectual about it, is at the center of ?Wise >Blood,? the novel she had already begun to write and submit to be read in >workshop. This is a tale in which pathos tips into pathology and violence, >answered by a penance of self-mutilation and suffering. Yet the prose is >absolutely brilliant, sentence by sentence, simile by simile, and so >relentlessly inventive it feels comic. >The young writer prays, ?Please let Christian principles permeate my >writing and please let there be enough of my writing (published) for >Christian principles to permeate.? At prayer she is scrupulous in her >candor, and a little wry therefore. She seems already to be making >important decisions about the means by which she will carry forward her >intention to write as a Christian, influenced by her reaction to the >assertive skepticism and the fashionable theism she senses around her. She >says, ?Give me the grace, dear God, to see the bareness and the misery of >the places where You are not adored but desecrated.? This might serve as a >gloss on the fiction she was writing at the time, which conjures such a >world. She asks: ?Am I trying to shock with God? Am I trying to push Him in >there violently, feet foremost? Maybe that?s all right. Maybe if I?m doing >it it?s all right?? Certainly by the standards of the most tentative or >perfunctory reverence her language can seem transgressive. Her religious >sincerity is beyond question, but the forms of its expression raise many >questions. This is no criticism. It is the honorable work of any writer who >touches on great matters to provoke. And it is a discipline of writing well >to allow the fiction to discover itself, however it may startle its >writer?s intentions as it does so. She says of the story for which she has >thanked God: ?I am not trying to disparage anybody?s religion although when >it was coming out, I didn?t know exactly what I was trying to do or what it >was going to mean. . . . Please don?t let me have to scrap the story >because it turns out to mean more wrong than right ? or any wrong.? > >The particular pleasure of life in Iowa City rests not so much in the fact >that the girl beside you on the bus or behind you in line might well be >pondering a great and turbulent tradition of thought and belief, and >finding new language to explore it. This could be true anywhere. It is that >here the privilege of hearing or seeing her thoughts as fiction or poetry, >even seeing them emerge and develop, is widely shared. This little journal >puts its reader a step closer to one touching and remarkable young mind. > >* * * > >*Marilynne Robinson is the author of three novels, including the Pulitzer >Prize-winning ?Gilead,? and four books of nonfiction. Her essay collection >?When I Was a Child I Read Books? was published last year.* > > >-- >*Jim & Nancy Forest* >Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands > >Jim's books: www.jimandnancyforest.com/books/ >Jim & Nancy web site: www.jimandnancyforest.com >Photo collections: www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/ >On Pilgrimage blog: http://jimandnancyonpilgrimage.blogspot.com/ >A Tale of Two Kidneys blog: http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/ >In Communion site: www.incommunion.org > >* * * >-------------- next part -------------- >An HTML attachment was scrubbed... >URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/attachments/20131116/8d27211b/attachment-0001.html > >------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >Percy-L mailing list >Percy-L at lists.ibiblio.org >http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l > > >End of Percy-L Digest, Vol 104, Issue 1 >*************************************** >-- >An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ > >Visit The Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > >Contact the moderator: percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org (note: add @ sign when addressing email) > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ehutton at huttonassociates.com Thu Nov 21 15:59:42 2013 From: ehutton at huttonassociates.com (ERNEST HUTTON) Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2013 15:59:42 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] Flannery OConnor's 'Prayer Journal' (Jim Forest) In-Reply-To: <1384795440.3978.YahooMailNeo@web140303.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1384795440.3978.YahooMailNeo@web140303.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <3CD0887C-86DE-452F-BDC7-DBBC34474AFA@huttonassociates.com> Of course, Flannery O'Connor made fun of everything. See her cartoons (bet few people knew about that!). She always wished she had become a New Yorker cartoonist. Her stuff reminds one of Roz Chast or Lynda Berry. http://www.fantagraphics.com/browse-shop/flannery-o-connor-the-cartoons-dec.-2011-2.html BTW, re Marilynne Robinson comment, I wouldn't use 'atheism' (Southern vernacular or otherwise) to describe either Wise Blood or Lancelot-- rather a form of Catholic agnostic existentialism: posing questions that have no answer. Ernie Hutton Ernest Watson Hutton Jr. FAICP Assoc AIA Hutton Associates Inc/ Planning Interaction One Union Square West Suite 813 New York NY 10003 ehutton at huttonassociates.com NOTE NEW OFFICE PHONE 12/ 2012: 917.836.7902 On Nov 18, 2013, at 12:24 PM, joshua emrich wrote: > Flannery O'Conner made fun of book clubs like this one. > > > > On Monday, November 18, 2013 6:45 AM, John E. Riley wrote: > Thank you for sharing this. The author of this review, Marilynne Robinson, is herself an accomplished author. I was struck by the following statement from her review: > > it is striking that atheism, in an apparently Southern, vernacular incarnation with nothing intellectual about it, is at the center of ?Wise Blood... > > To bring things full circle, I can see that statement, or at least parts of it, applying to Lancelot as well. > > John Riley > Reference > Mullins Library > University of Arkansas > Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA > > > ________________________________________ > From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] on behalf of percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org [percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org] > Sent: Saturday, November 16, 2013 11:00 AM > To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org > Subject: Percy-L Digest, Vol 104, Issue 1 > > Send Percy-L mailing list submissions to > percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org > > You can reach the person managing the list at > percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of Percy-L digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Flannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? (Jim Forest) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 12:21:43 +0100 > From: Jim Forest > Subject: [percy-l] Flannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? > To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" > > Message-ID: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" > > On the theory that Walker Percy readers are also, in may cases, Flannery > O"Connor readers, I share the following. > > Jim Forest > > http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/books/review/flannery-oconnors-prayer-journal.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20131115 > > The BelieverFlannery O?Connor?s ?Prayer Journal? By MARILYNNE ROBINSON NY > Times / Published: November 15, 2013 > > This slender, charming book must be approached with a special tact. To read > it feels a little like an intrusion on inwardness itself. The volume > contains, alongside a lightly corrected transcription, a facsimile of the > Sterling notebook in which Flannery O?Connor, just 20 years old, began a > journal addressed to God. Written in her neat hand, it is reproduced > complete with the empty final pages (her concluding words are ?there is > nothing left to say of me?) and not omitting a bit of musical notation > floating on the inside of the back cover. The prayers, attempts at prayer > and meditations on faith and art contained in it were written in 1946 and > 1947, while O?Connor was a student in Iowa. The brilliance that would make > her fictions literary classics is fully apparent in them. > Enlarge This Image > Martha Sprieser (Georgia College Library, Milledgeville) > > A PRAYER JOURNAL > > By Flannery O?Connor > > 96 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $18. > > The complexity of O?Connor?s thinking, together with the largely flawless > pages in her hand, suggest that these entries may be fair copies of earlier > drafts. Clearly O?Connor?s virtuosity makes her self-?conscious. Young as > she was, new to writing, she could only have been pleased, even awed, at > having produced these beautiful sentences. Perhaps nothing written is > finally meant to go unread, even if the reader is only a creature of the > writer?s mind, an attentive and exacting self that compels refinements of > honesty. After a little joke about the pedestrian uses we would make of a > knowledge of heaven if we had been given one, she says, remembering her > intended Hearer, ?But I do not mean to be clever although I do mean to be > clever on 2nd thought and like to be clever & want to be considered so.? > Her mind is examined, faith questioned, weakness confessed, powers tried as > they might not have been under the eye of any human observer. Youth and > loneliness and the unspent energies of a singular mind are testing the > possible and must be allowed free play. > > It is the religious sensibility reflected in this journal that makes it as > eloquent on the subject of creativity as it is on the subject of prayer. > O?Connor?s awareness of her gifts gives her a special kind of interest in > them. Having concluded one early entry by asking the Lord to help her ?with > this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing,? she begins the next > entry: ?Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me > a story. Don?t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the > instrument for Your story ? just like the typewriter was mine.? > > Every writer wonders where fictional ideas come from. The best of them > often appear very abruptly after a period of imaginative drought. And, > mysteriously, they really are good ideas, much superior to the contrivances > of conscious invention. Such experiences are by no means exclusive to > writers with religious worldviews. But believing them to be literal gifts > grants them an objective existence they seem actually to deserve. This > entails problems, of course. Fiction rarely shows a divine imprimatur, as > its mortal creators are well aware. I would be curious to know what story > or part of a story by O?Connor should be attributed to the Lord. It can > seem self-aggrandizing or simply bizarre to ascribe any thought or work to > a seemingly external source, named or unnamed. Nevertheless, ?Hesiod, > Pindar and any number of poets and prophets before and after them have > declared indebtedness of this kind. If they, and O?Connor, were na?ve, > sophistication has made language poorer. There is no way now to describe an > experience many a writer can attest to, having been surprised by it, and > having enjoyed it as a particular pleasure and reward of the art. Religion > is by its nature more accommodating to the unaccountable than rationalism > ever can be. > > While O?Connor was a student at the Iowa Writers? Workshop she was also a > daily communicant at St. Mary?s Catholic Church at the edge of campus. Her > journal reflects a conflict, in her mind at least, between a skeptical > intellectual environment and the faith she sometimes anxiously sustains. > She says: ?I dread, Oh Lord, losing my faith. My mind is not strong. It is > a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery. I do not want it to be fear > which keeps me in the church.? She knows all the arguments against > religion. They seem to have changed little over the last 70 years, so there > is no need to rehearse them here. Considering the threat she feels them to > be, it is striking that atheism, in an apparently Southern, vernacular > incarnation with nothing intellectual about it, is at the center of ?Wise > Blood,? the novel she had already begun to write and submit to be read in > workshop. This is a tale in which pathos tips into pathology and violence, > answered by a penance of self-mutilation and suffering. Yet the prose is > absolutely brilliant, sentence by sentence, simile by simile, and so > relentlessly inventive it feels comic. > The young writer prays, ?Please let Christian principles permeate my > writing and please let there be enough of my writing (published) for > Christian principles to permeate.? At prayer she is scrupulous in her > candor, and a little wry therefore. She seems already to be making > important decisions about the means by which she will carry forward her > intention to write as a Christian, influenced by her reaction to the > assertive skepticism and the fashionable theism she senses around her. She > says, ?Give me the grace, dear God, to see the bareness and the misery of > the places where You are not adored but desecrated.? This might serve as a > gloss on the fiction she was writing at the time, which conjures such a > world. She asks: ?Am I trying to shock with God? Am I trying to push Him in > there violently, feet foremost? Maybe that?s all right. Maybe if I?m doing > it it?s all right?? Certainly by the standards of the most tentative or > perfunctory reverence her language can seem transgressive. Her religious > sincerity is beyond question, but the forms of its expression raise many > questions. This is no criticism. It is the honorable work of any writer who > touches on great matters to provoke. And it is a discipline of writing well > to allow the fiction to discover itself, however it may startle its > writer?s intentions as it does so. She says of the story for which she has > thanked God: ?I am not trying to disparage anybody?s religion although when > it was coming out, I didn?t know exactly what I was trying to do or what it > was going to mean. . . . Please don?t let me have to scrap the story > because it turns out to mean more wrong than right ? or any wrong.? > > The particular pleasure of life in Iowa City rests not so much in the fact > that the girl beside you on the bus or behind you in line might well be > pondering a great and turbulent tradition of thought and belief, and > finding new language to explore it. This could be true anywhere. It is that > here the privilege of hearing or seeing her thoughts as fiction or poetry, > even seeing them emerge and develop, is widely shared. This little journal > puts its reader a step closer to one touching and remarkable young mind. > > * * * > > *Marilynne Robinson is the author of three novels, including the Pulitzer > Prize-winning ?Gilead,? and four books of nonfiction. Her essay collection > ?When I Was a Child I Read Books? was published last year.* > > > -- > *Jim & Nancy Forest* > Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands > > Jim's books: www.jimandnancyforest.com/books/ > Jim & Nancy web site: www.jimandnancyforest.com > Photo collections: www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/ > On Pilgrimage blog: http://jimandnancyonpilgrimage.blogspot.com/ > A Tale of Two Kidneys blog: http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/ > In Communion site: www.incommunion.org > > * * * > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/attachments/20131116/8d27211b/attachment-0001.html > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Percy-L mailing list > Percy-L at lists.ibiblio.org > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l > > > End of Percy-L Digest, Vol 104, Issue 1 > *************************************** > -- > An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ > > Visit The Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > > Contact the moderator: percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org (note: add @ sign when addressing email) > > -- > An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ > > Visit The Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > > Contact the moderator: percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org (note: add @ sign when addressing email) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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